His book, Where Bigfoot Walks, is more about wilderness than mythical forest monkey creatures. In it, we meet Sasquatch footprint faker Ray Wallace, Bob Gimlin—famous for filming the first possibly real footage of Bigfoot in the ’60s—and Cliff Barackman, co-host of the TV series Finding Bigfoot. Barackman will appear at the Oregon Sasquatch Festival. Pyle writes of the Dark Divide, a stretch of land near Mount St. Helens where many Bigfoot sightings originate. The 70-year-old lepidopterist, with a doctorate from Yale, carries a butterfly net but no cell phone on his treks through Bigfoot country—meaning if he ever sees Bigfoot, we’ll have to take his word for it.

“I don’t travel with a device because I don’t speak connectedness when I’m out there,” he says.

The author is neither a true believer, nor a dedicated skeptic. He’s more a Bigfoot agnostic.

“I am a biologist and I have not seen the animal, so how can I say I know or believe?” Pyle says. “So far, I don’t have a better hypothesis than the existence of this animal. But it’s also not definitive proof.”